George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
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Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#2Capitalism is based on there being a customer. All the capital in the world doesn't do any good if there's not a buyer on the other end. Another argument for a strong middle class.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#3Wow - this is so close to the FLOSS ideology! I'll need to read that book.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#4Capitalism is based on there being a customer. All the capital in the world doesn't do any good if there's not a buyer on the other end. Another argument for a strong middle class.
Capitalism is not based on the existence of a customer. It's based in freedom, in the right of every individual to do what he or she wants to do with his or her own life and property.
Of course, if there is no customer, there can be no sale. However, the sale itself isn't always the point. Sometimes people do things just for the fun of it -- and that's capitalism, too.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#5"In capitalism, the winners do not eat the losers but teach them how to win through the spread of information."
This certainly casts patents in an anti-capitalist light...
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#6Capitalism is based on there being a customer. All the capital in the world doesn't do any good if there's not a buyer on the other end. Another argument for a strong middle class.
> Capitalism is based on there being a customer. All the capital in the world doesn't do any good if there's not a buyer on the other end. Another argument for a strong middle class.
I fail to see how these sentences form an "argument".
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#7Capitalism has its problems, but its critical selling point is that, if it works well, you don't need official approval to do business. In the USSR, it was a crime to compete with the one established business: the state. Fusions of state and business power (whether from the left, as in communism, or from the right, as in fascism) are almost always bad. The major win (practical and moral) in capitalism is the right of the individual to interact with the market without official approval.
If you look at corporate hierarchies, however, you see that they're run internally like command economies. Headcounts and projects are written up and assigned by gloomy, bureaucratic committees detached from the actual heartbeat of the business. You're assigned a role, and if you try to "compete" by seeking a different role or starting a skunk-works project, most companies will fire you or otherwise work to shut you down. Companies are statist in the extreme.
Corporatism is a system designed to give the best of both systems (capitalism and socialism) for a well-connected, parasitic social elite (called "the 1 percent", but really they're about 0.2%) and the worst of both for everyone else. You see this, for example, in commercial air travel, where you get Soviet quality of service but the bizarre, unpredictable pricing you'd expect from a runaway market (that is actually not so much a "market" as an algorithm designed to fuck you over).
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#8"In capitalism, the winners do not eat the losers but teach them how to win through the spread of information." This certainly casts patents in an anti-capitalist light...
Apple could certainly be seen in the light of greed here. They are doing extremely well anyway, making money hand over first, and yet they still can't sleep well at night knowing there are other touchscreen devices on the market besides their own, and they're abusing every piece of patent technicality to ban their products from the market.
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#9[deleted]
Re: George Gilder: Capitalism is based on information and knowledge, not greed
#10Capitalism is based on information, knowledge, greed for money, greed for ownership, desire for accomplishment, and a lot of other things. Information is one of these things. Information is a means to a lot of other ends as well.
I look dimly on people who say "Capitalism is driven by X" where X is some narrowly defined band of things. From Rand to Marx, theories that look like invariably turn out wrong, sometimes disastrously so. In economic speak, an incentive is anything that a person in question might want. The desire to acquire information and the rewards of using it are one kind of incentive. It's common for random econ pundits to try to redefine "incentive" as "greed", and this should be the first clue that they either don't know or don't care what economists actually think.